Living with a baby in the house is a little like having a drunken bum as a roommate. There’s a lot of unintelligible gurgling, jerky hand movements, and an unspoken expectation that you’ll always be there to clean them up. And neither one is much of an earner.
I don’t have children myself — somehow, you knew that, didn’t you? — but I have often written scripts with babies in them, and I’ve never not regretted it.
Sometimes, you just can’t avoid putting a baby in a scene. Sometimes, you actually have to show a baby moving around on camera, and you can’t just wrap a small pork loin in a blanket, say, “The baby’s sleeping,” and get away with it.
The trouble is, hiring a baby is like hiring any other kind of actor (a lot like it, frankly, when you think of the noise and the smell). But unlike any other actor, babies and children are regulated — something about child labor laws — which means you can’t just make a baby work a solid eight hours like a regular person. Apparently, you have to let a baby rest.
According to California labor rules, a baby’s skin is sensitive, so they can only be under the hot studio lights for a few minutes at a time. And then they need to sleep and eat and be held.
That’s led to the two- or three-baby solution. When one baby reaches his or her legally codified limit of on-set time, you just rotate a new baby in.
This is why maternity hospitals in the Hollywood area often notify baby talent agents — I mean agents who represent babies, not agents who are physically or emotionally immature, which would be an unnecessary specification — when triplets or quintuplets are born. Being able to swap out identical babies results in significant savings, and it’s not like those babies have anything else to do, right? Put ‘em to work, I say.
The first time I wrote a show with a baby front and center, the studio lawyer who handled labor relations sat me down to go over the rules of working with infants. It became instantly clear that what was supposed to be a half-hour show shot in one night was about to become a half-hour show shot over the course of a calendar year.
I had idiotically written a lot of baby material. There were scenes and scenes of baby-walking and baby-feeding and baby close-ups.
On the page, obviously, everything looks fine. You never think when you write the line, “The baby smiles, then vomits” that you’re going to have to figure out a way to make that happen. Childless guys like me just assume babies are smiling and vomiting all day long. Kind of a point-the-camera-and-wait-a-second situation.
Some of you reading this who have more experience with infants know the truth, which is that a baby will never do anything on cue. Babies have terrible timing.
And it goes without saying that the bounds of common decency and the State of California Child Protection code (which aren’t the same thing) rule out any kind of, um, inducement to perform the scripted behavior, even though in my experience, the parents of working show-business babies will do whatever it takes to keep the little one earning.
So, what to do?
Hire a robot baby, is what.
I discovered that while it was impossible to shoot the show with a live baby, no matter how many of them we had stacked up like cordwood, ready to go, it would be a cinch with a robot baby, which can smile and spits up when you press the button on the box that connects to the baby at the end of a long, translucent cord.
“Let’s hire the robot baby,” we said.
“We can’t afford it,” the studio said.
The robot baby’s maker, you see, knows exactly how valuable his property is and has priced it accordingly. This is the opposite of how economics teaches us that automation is supposed to go, but in Hollywood, the rules of normal economics are often reversed.
So, we settled on a baby hybrid. We shot some scenes with a real baby — cheaper, but more complicated — and did the rest with the robot baby, which we only rented for a few hours.
I could swear that the real baby saw the robot baby and quickly figured out the economics of the situation and knew that he had better really sell the material or it’d be an all-robot situation.
Which is a solution that probably works in life, too.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
